The Sterile House That Leaks

The bulk of today NYT's magazine is dedicated to architecture's unique ability to piss us off.
One of the most telling failures of what might be called latter day modernism is the WTC site, when the initial set of designs from the top firms in the world didn't impress anyone, not because they were too innovative, but because they were too conservative to the last 70 years
of unexamined assumptions.

The essential problem: architects tend to see resistance to their designs as reactionary. That was absolutely true - in 1915. Most of the rest of us see most architects as rigidly ideologically in their endlessly repeated obsession with certain stylistic aspects of architectural modernism: namely, rigid, linear geometries, sterility as the only beauty, craftsmanship and decoration and even art itself (see the history of the World Trade Center) as impure design distractions. As ever in human experience, the buildings build us: and indeed we are tending to become hard, transparent, indistinct, commodified, empty, utterly interchangeable, without pasts or futures.

There is a more personal problem, too. As you may or may not know, architects have been bullying artists out of the field of art, literally displacing artists from galleries and commissions with their own works. They do this first by demeaning the working methods of artists with an ideological attack notable for its rigid consistency, and backed by large firms with cash, organization and desire for prestige, Architects eat artist's lunches, pushing themselves into taking over sculpture and installation,- they drive much of the anti-making, anti-material, high concept ideology in some of contemporary art, positing themselves in pseudo-Warholian grandeur against artists making objects themselves, thinking individually, or exploring beauty and chaos, and shoving through high-concept sterility as the be all and end all of aesthetics, leaving art and design a sexless, gormless field.

At the moment, finally, it's ebbing a bit.

Start here with a Steven Holl house for the artist Richard Tuttle, the best imaginable client for contemporary architectural innovation, but got modernism's typical overreaching and crappy execution.

Tuttle: "The place is uninhabitable half the time. It's too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. With lasers, they devised a footprint, a slab, on site, then when the panels arrived they didn't fit — they had to pull them together with straps, like a corset. Not very bright. Any damn fool knows you don't do these two things separately. I respect Steven. He's an artist. It's not his fault if the whole architecture profession is ego gone wild." He adds: "It turns out that the greatest invention, the one that made civilization possible, is caulking."

I regret that we have not heard from Dr. X on these matters, who I know from extensive discussions is a great lover of organic grace and humanism in design. This record of aesthetic contention would serve his oft-expressed distaste for rigid geometry and reflexive quasi-modernity in building design in any of the lively arguments he would no doubt pursue with Monsieur Latouche, although they would certainly agree, as do I, with the adoption of progressive political values and human scale in design, a peculiarity in modernist architecture that, as I reflect, may not extend beyond the U.S. West Coast.